Katy Smith - Free Men

I found my father by the still. His mouth was full. What smelled of pepper now smelled like something spoiled. I pushed him on his side to let the dribble out, but he was stiff and his hands instead of flopping froze. His eyes were open and were brown and his face was brown and his neck was gray. I called his name and he didn’t answer, but he never answered. I tucked his hair behind his ears. I wiped his chin. I crossed his hands upon his chest and stole his shoes.

ASLEEP IN THE house is where they found me. I had been there enough days that I no longer knew how long. One of the men came with rye and asked me questions and I said nothing. Another man, and I said nothing, took a sack of coins from a hole in the fireplace. I didn’t know it was there. He left me bread. Then the men in simple clothes with plain hair, three of them, who kneeled to where I lay and touched my forehead with dry palms. They lifted me and I thought it was my father again, but backward, and I fought because I thought they would drown me. Only kin could kill me, I tried to say. They put me in the back of a cart and opened my mouth to spoon honey in. I tried to spit it out but it stuck to my tongue, the backs of my teeth. Sweetness. I licked it off myself and swallowed. They swore they wouldn’t harm me.

“Will someone bury my father?” I asked.

I had tried once myself, but he was swaddled in flies. I stood some steps away and told him I was sorry for what I had done to his quilt. I slapped my face to show him he wasn’t wrong for hitting me.

They told me he was at peace.

“In the ground?”

We’d had dead men before. Men my father may have shot, though I didn’t see. He told me bodies haunt you if they’re not put well under. I could hardly lift the shovel, but I helped him. Scrabbled the dirt with my hands, heaping it out, heaping it back. We buried the men like my father buried his twisted sticks. Maybe too the she was there, the one that once belonged to us. Things died in the forest, and you had to put them under.

I didn’t want my father haunting me.

“In the ground?”

One of the men nodded, though he was looking off, and the other two drove the cart on. Out of the forest, away from the creek and the clearing and the still and the squirrel and the body.

AWAY FROM HOME, nothing looked like home. We were going south. Some trees and fields, but houses too. Long stretches with all-the-same plants. The hills went away. I’d peek sometimes, but mostly I slept and feigned to sleep until Savannah. Easier not to look. We stopped once at an inn for the night, though I was asleep when they carried me in. I didn’t get to see the cows I heard lowing. The mattresses were up on stilts. I thought they’d swallow me, so soft. There was even a pot beneath my bed, as if they knew. In the morning, the men gave me tea in a leaf-thin cup. I didn’t break a thing.

It was hot afternoon, me still eyes-shut in the back of the cart, when we stopped. The house was long and wood, with a stick stuck in the roof and a smaller stick across it. The road rolled in clods of dirt. I looked ahead and behind and didn’t see anything else but that long house, like it had grown up from a seed with no company. They lifted me out again and I tried to ask.

“Where is this?” I said. It had been a long time since I’d spoke.

The man set me on my feet and took my hand. The others went ahead, walked the stone path between the prickly bushes. They looked such a long way away, knocking at the door. Someone came out. Everyone moved their hands. My hand was still in the man’s, which was sweaty. It was hot afternoon. Then there was nodding and the man started walking forward. My feet didn’t know to follow him. I tripped, and he waited. We stumbled that way to the wide board porch. I stood in front of a door wider than five of me, their hands on my arms now, calling me orphan . The one who took me was low and soft in long black robes and had a chest that ballooned toward me. I placed my hands upon it and pushed into its softness and when she chirped, I learned what a woman was.

The three men patted me and shook hands and bowed at the woman, who they named Christian, and the woman bowed, and then they turned back down the prickle path. I said, “Wait!”

“Where?” I said.

They turned and nodded, and the one who held my hand just waved. Why did it take three men to carry me here, and one woman to take me? What was in her front to make it so soft? I pushed at it again. She grabbed my wrists in one hand and pulled me inside. It was dark and cool and the shadows moved.

She showed me the rooms where children slept, the room where children ate, and a big room where children put their hands together and thought about goodness. All children, no fathers. As we walked, we saw other women. Swathed in black robes, crows with belly-pale fish in their mouths. I was still six, and deathly scared. They flocked around the beds, in the halls. I saw them kneeling and striding, wings spread, chests bobbing. At night, they hunched over us and cawed in a language that was not our own. Most raised their eyes when walking, so I’d only see their underlashes. They did not smile, though some glowed. Women, if these were they, were not our kind. Women were not to be befriended, touched.

The other children were thin as stirring spoons, all named orphan too. Their eyes bulged like fish, caught by crows. My own hands trembled to feel. The husk beds, the white basins, the wavy windowed glass. The first night I curled into a pillbug on my bed, then saw the boy one over had wool. I peeled back his blanket, scurtled in with him, closed our woolen nest. I wrapped my arms around his middle and slept. Dreamed it was my father let me hold him so. In the morning, the boy kicked me in the stomach and screamed for the women. They bundled me away and plunged me in cold water and combed my hair for nits. They slapped my cheeks and fed me mashed corn and dressed me in shirt and breeches so small my legs could not bend enough to sit, so when I was weary of standing I lay down.

Each day before dawn came, we were forced onto knees, my seams split. The older boys chanted loud, and I mumbled along. They all were addressing my father. I was some surprised but said, “Yes, Father, I hope you are well in heaven, hollow though you be.” We sang songs that sounded like moans. We ate from wooden bowls as the sun woke, then washed our ears and went to field. Cotton grew, and corn. Melon in the summer. No lazing here, no pausing to nap by firesides or gaze antward. I was not a farmer but a boy. I followed the one in front of me, who bent with pudgy hands for weeds. I thought to pull what he pulled, but he pulled them all before me. I walked close behind. Our work was twinned. We did this for not long — there were black men who did the rest. They were older and didn’t mind. We did it for our morals, is what I learned. After an hour of morals, we were inside again and at our lessons. I pulled my fingers up to count, but never knew what to call them. One, two, three, and stopped. The books I never figured. The other boys were all kinds of sizes but to the last they knew their letters. One would stand in front and say rhyming things, and another would sit at a desk and spell out loud, and another drew loops of lines on slate. Proud they were, to speak of things that made no sense. I thought them stupid.

“You’ll learn,” the teacher said.

“Learn what?” I said. I had never seen a man in the world say rhyming things. Not even the men with gold buttons carried slates in their coats. I saw no hope for these boys with their letters. I moved my mouth when we all recited, but nothing came out, and no one minded. No one minded, long as I remembered my father in the evenings.

One night I hated him. Or was afraid. The coldness of his hands returned to me, and I wanted shed of him. I bent down with the other boys and while they praised I cursed. “Damn you, Father, damn you,” and when the master heard, my back grew bloody wings, stripes laid all across. Another boy stood and showed me how to speak and for his pains was given figs. I watched the juices in his mouth. I rolled my tongue into a curl. My back burned. His lips dribbled. “He is not my brother,” I thought. “He is not my father’s son.”